Forty Days on Being a Three

By Sean Palmer

What is it like to be an Enneagram Three?
Pastor Sean Palmer reflects on this question in a spirit of honest self-assessment. He draws wisdom from the deep wells of both counseling and spirituality using illustrations from Scripture and life. Each of the forty daily readings concludes with an opportunity for further engagement such as a journaling prompt, a written prayer, or a spiritual practice.
Any of us can find aspects of ourselves in any of the numbers. The Enneagram is a profound tool for empathy, so whether or not you are a Three, you will grow from your reading about Threes and enhance your relationships across the Enneagram spectrum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IVP Formatio
• Release date: Oct 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9780830847471

Sean Palmer

Sean Palmer is the teaching pastor at Ecclesia Houston, a speaker, and an executive coach. He is the author of Unarmed Empire and a contributing writer to The Voice Bible. Sean is vice-chair of the Missio Alliance board. He and his wife, Rochelle, live in Houston, Texas, with their two daughters.

Book preview

ON BEING A THREE

Everyone needs a spiritual director and a therapist," says my friend Suzanne Stabile. So I spend Monday mornings with John.

John is my therapist, my I don’t give a crap who you are guy. As an Enneagram Three, I find it helpful to know John and people like him—people who couldn’t care less what I do, who I know, or what I’ve accomplished.

My first spiritual director was Don, who I met in seminary at Fuller Northern California. Don showed me what it looked like to be real, open, and honest. Before he knew me much at all, he shared with me his victories and defeats, as a son, husband, father, and businessman. He was open about the one thing I don’t want to share with anyone, even myself: failure.

As an Enneagram Three, my core sin is deceit. That doesn’t really mean what people often think it does. It doesn’t mean I lie, though, at times, I’m confident I do. Deceit means I live at the edge of duplicity. I don’t want to. I want to be esteemed. I want to be admired. I want to be loved. I want to be in relationship with people. In fact, I want to be in relationship with people more than I want anything else. But somewhere along my path I got the misguided idea that being loved required being valuable, worthwhile, or at least looking valuable and worthwhile. And not just successful in some generic or universal sense, but successful in presenting a version of myself that the person or the room of people before me wanted to see.

There’s just no way to be successful at looking successful to everyone without creatively shading the picture. That’s deceit.

In one of my favorite movies, A Few Good Men, Demi Moore’s Lt. Cdr. JoAnne Galloway and Tom Cruise’s Lt. Daniel Kaffee go out for seafood. After Galloway gives Kaffee a rundown of her accomplishments, Kaffee asks, Why are you always giving me your résumé? JoAnne responds, Because I want you to think that I’m a good lawyer. I don’t know where JoAnn Galloway might type herself on the Enneagram (I never, ever, ever type other people), but Galloway’s response was pure Enneagram Three.

And that’s why I need John and Don.

They don’t care about my résumé. Giving it to them would make me feel silly, stupid even.

My problem is I’ve spent a good bit of time and energy building that résumé. I’ve been in professional ministry for over twenty-three years, currently serving as teaching pastor for a large church in Houston, Texas. I’m also a writer, speaker, and coach for other speakers and preachers. At the same time, I enjoy the gifts of a wonderful wife, Rochelle, and two beautiful teenaged daughters, Malia and Katharine. I have both a home office and a home gym because my daily instinct is to do something.

When I signed the contract for my first book, Unarmed Empire: In Search of Beloved Community, I called Don. All my other friends received the news with excitement. Not Don. There were no congratulations. No well done. No you’ve earned it. Don said, Wow! How do you think that will impact your relationships with Rochelle and your daughters?

I felt deflated. Why? Because I want you to think I’m a good . . . pastor.

Like Don, John doesn’t care if I’m a good pastor. He’s more concerned if being a pastor is good for me. Every Enneagram Three needs both a John and a Don. We need people who don’t care about what we’ve accomplished or are trying to accomplish. We need someone who looks at our failures with grace and kindness, who knows those false steps are passing realities of life and not a reflection of our value.

You might not have found a John or a Don yet. Even if you haven’t discovered your I don’t give a crap who you are people, you don’t really need to in order to unearth the truth your heart needs most: you are loved.

Stop.

Dwell on that.

You are loved.

The best thing you can do right now is let your heart hunker down in the deep truth that you are loved and lovable. The late Catholic priest, writer, and theologian Henri Nouwen wrote,

The world tells you many lies about who you are, and you simply have to be realistic enough to remind yourself of this. Every time you feel hurt, offended, or rejected, you have to dare to say to yourself: These feelings, strong as they may be, are not telling me the truth about myself. The truth, even though I cannot feel it right now, is that I am the chosen child of God, precious in God’s eyes, called the Beloved from all eternity, and held safe in an everlasting belief.

And isn’t love what you most deeply crave?

The Enneagram came to me after a series of prolonged and public failures, the kind that left me crying in bed at night and crushingly disappointed with God and myself. And I’m glad that it did. Had the Enneagram arrived any sooner, my outsized ego and dreams of a flourishing future would have silenced its wisdom. The beauty of failure—at least the beauty around my failures—was that in the midst of it, God revealed to me who my friends were, who my friends weren’t, and who loved me for me, rather than for what I did or how I performed. In a world consumed with fans and followers, nothing can replace the abiding love of the faithful people God surrounds you with.

The beauty of the Enneagram is its dynamic nature. For starters, you are not your number. You are your true self, the beautiful, wonderfully made person you were created to be, your essence, in Enneagram language. Your Enneagram number is a strategy to find love and meaning; that number is an explanation, not a reason or excuse for stagnancy or complacency. The Enneagram works best as a tool for growth, not a mechanism for a system of stasis.

Besides your core number, there are three crucial aspects of the Enneagram you will need to be aware of—your behavioral changes in stress and security, your wings, and subtypes.

First, let’s consider the direction of the arrows, or what some Enneagram teachers call integration/disintegration or stress/security. Stress and security seem more evocative and truer to my personal experience, so, with apologies to and with an appreciation for various schools of thought and experiences, I will use stress/security for shorthand throughout. In stress and security, each Enneagram type takes on some of the positive or negative behaviors of other types. For example, Enneagram Threes in security and integration adopt the positive or negative behaviors of Enneagram Sixes; while in stress, Threes will take on the positive or negative behaviors of Enneagram Nines.

There are three key distinctions we need to be aware of concerning stress and security. For one, no one moves to another number. Your core personality persists. We merely take on the behaviors and not the motivations of another number. Second, inside this dynamism you can adopt either (or both) the positive or negative behaviors of the other number. This is commonly called the high or low side of your stress and security numbers. Many Enneagram students misdiagnose their numbers because they examine their behaviors (not their motivations) only to find out, often much later, that they had actually been living in stress when they encountered the Enneagram and weren’t who they thought they were. Third, the behaviors we adopt in stress and security are necessary to survive. For instance, there was a time I was frustrated by a coworker who consistently shut down my ideas, even those our